Murray Altheim wrote:
>
> ... Note that ISO believes their version of HTML [ISOHTML] will have a
> lifespan of up to 25 years. It's better to opt for interoperability....
Tantek Celik wrote:
>
> "interoperable" and "based upon a new foundation" do not belong in the same
> sentence. It is easy to interoperate with the future - that doesn't mean
> anything. Interoperating with the present, the very productive present, is
> true interoperability.
>
> It is my hope that the various XML based technologies being worked on will
> be designed, developed and deployed in such a way as to be maximally useful
> with the present web, not just some future mythical emerald city web.
I could not have said that better myself. For those very reasons,
the proposal, Form-based Device Input and Upload in HTML,
http://www.bovik.org/device-upload.html
has been designed with complete forward and backward compatibility,
interoperable with existing browsers, not just future browsers. It
was designed according to the explicit requirements of the Cisco
Speech Training and Accent Reduction training staff, part of the
Organizational Effectiveness department of Cisco Systems. The
people responsible for S.T.A.R. training at Cisco made it explicitly
clear that they did not want to depend on CD-ROMs for spoken
language instruction, and a half-dozen independent experts, as well
as computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Stanford agree.
It would be wise if those involved consider the very human
consequences of their actions, before rushing to support an XML
schema-based standard that can't even reference the data
represented by such schemas. Sometimes people in charge let their
own aspirations get in the way of the obvious, if not as glorious,
path. The "next generation of HTML forms" is unlikely to be
implemented unless it is compatible with existing forms, browsers,
and server software. Is there any reason why they would?
Cheers,
James Salsman